Questions about finances and printing zines!

[litonico]

Where does the money for printing come from?

1. People charge for zines (I think we should do this one! this gives folks control over how many they print / how much they expect to earn / earning a profit from zines)
   • Are there ATMs nearby? Do we encourage authors to get Square?
   • What are relevant California laws about selling things?
   • Do folks need a state-level entity to sell a thing, like a proprietorship? (as far as I know, no)
   • City-level business license? (as far as I know, no)
   • Seller's Permit? (as far as I know, yes)
   • How do taxes even work in California?
2. We have money and pay for printing
   • It takes (a lot of?) money!! Depends on the number of people and expected # of attendees
   • Easier on authors
   • Probably restricted to printing on thin office-printer paper. Should be fine for most zines, but some pro zineists (e.g. jvns) print on gloss. Are pro zineists OK with selling worse zines? (for reference, the beautiful glossy zines we printed for jvns for Deconstruct looked amazing, but totaled $3000)
   • Do we reimburse printing costs?
   • Or Coordinate printing? Coordinating printing is hard, printers mess stuff up all the time so there will be a lot of organizer effort here. Imagine everything that could accidentally go wrong in printing a piece of paper, and then at least one of those will happen for every print job. Especially on the final-final2.pdf-wedonthavetimeforthis-justprintplz copy
   • Where do we get the money?
     • !!Con budget?
     • Is !!Con in to that?

This is a 3d table, really, with "audience pays for zines / audience doesn't pay" on one axis, "czf pays for printing / authors pay for printing" on the second axis, and "authors get revenue, czf gets revenue" on the third.

• Do we have organizational overhead?

  • It doesn't seem like we're paying for space
  • Do we need to buy equipment? Seems like everything's provided by the school

• Do we want to print and display zines from a few people who can't be at the event? (I think yes!)

  • Who? Our very favorite zineists? (I really like this idea !!)
  • If authors are charging for zines:
    • Is one of us in charge of tabling for all of those people? (this seems like the easiest way)
    • We have to coordinate print volume / their expected sales volume with them
  • We have to coordinate actually printing their zines, sending them proof copies, all the stuff that you do when you print something
  • If we are inviting folks, and if authors pay for printing, we should probably have a policy like: even if you do not sell enough zines to cover printing costs, we will cover printing costs for you.

[daiyi]

These are excellent thoughts, thank you so much for writing this up.

My thoughts:

1. Let's create a doc on the legal concerns of selling things in California and begin documenting our findings. I suspect there is much prior art, perhaps we can find some guidelines from anime/comic conventions to fork. I like your note that we include these guidelines in a playbook for zine tablers. In fact, let's also create a playbook for zine tablers!

2. (Do we have money?) I think for logistical reasons we should expect all tablers to show up with their own zines ready to go. I think this is reasonable since part of zine culture is that they're supposed to be lo-fi and cheap to produce as an alternative to actual press (:

oops I have more thoughts but insufficient time, brb /o/

[meldckn]

Chiming in to answer some questions:

• There are no ATMs at the zinefest space, so we should recommend exhibitors bring a means for credit card vending, and publicize to attendees that they might want to bring cash. There are Bank of America, Bay Federal Credit Union, and Wells Fargo ATMs in Quarry Plaza (~15-20 min, hilly walk one way). And there might be an independent ATM at Owl's Nest Cafe (~10 min, flat walk). We should check so we can direct people if needed.
• RE: Do we have money?: We could likely get some funding from the Computational Media Grad Community fund, if we put together a budget / have a plan for what we need money for.
• We aren't paying for space (thanks !!Con West!). We might have to pay for table and chair rental.

In terms of printing zines:

• If selling other people's zines becomes too hard to organize, we could have a zine library table, where we display but not sell zines from people who couldn't come. It's a pretty common pattern at zinefests. I'd personally prefer if people could take them home, but as a plan B..
• @bbaltaxe also talked about printing historical computing "zines", like Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which would be awesome. Do we want to do this? If so, could we think of others?
• I'd hate for printing costs to deter someone from coming. I'm sure we could use CM grad funds to help pay for printing if that's an issue for someone. Or we could slyly use free (poor quality, unreliable) university printing as a plan C.